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Improve editor management. The current mechanism for switching between editors using tabs does not scale to having many open editors. Eclipse should provide a more scalable and stable, yet efficient, UI for switching between editors. [Platform UI] [Theme: User experience]
Should consider adopting working sets for editor management. See bug 37589.
See comments from those who liked the prototype editor list drop-down, in bug 32226.
Hopefully this will not show up twice:) Instead of a drop down for open editors consider implementing this functionality in a View. The drop down list, although I found it usefull, had some limitations suchas dealing with alot of open editors and windows. A View implementation on the other hand offers far more possibilities. Sorting, ability to select multiple editors for saving/closing. The ability to show open editors for all open windows ect.. With a view approach you could also allow for extentions to the functionality of the view such as the ability to select multiple open editors to do a cvs update/commit. Also in a View you display more information about the editor/file then would be possible in a drop down such as the path to the file, not just the file name, what window it is open in, if showing editors from all windows etc... I think in the end a view offers far more then a drop down can with just as much ease of switching between the editors. Plus with the use of the extion points to the view the basic functionality could be added pretty quickly and then additioanl functionality added later.
Frankly, I'm hostile to the idea of adding a view for editor management. Perspectives should not be required to carry additional views to offer basic functionality, Platform UI clients need that space for their own purposes. I also don't want extra clutter in my screen layout to manage editors when editor area is already the largest piece. Functionality that can't be met with the dropdown and is judged to be useful enough for inclusion in the platform can go into a revised (and simplified?) version of the editor dialog. To be honest, sometimes I don't even like to open and close editors manually. Maybe it's because I'm getting too used to browser mentality, but I really want to see new files under their own tab if I'm following a parallel/simultaneous train of thought. The one advantage of having individual editors from my perspective is being able to change between them with one click, and I wouldn't like to lose that to a dropdown or the navigation history where the same action takes two clicks. Using gestures can help here. It's also important to provide a way of opening files in a new tab directly, like the wheel/third button click.
Just to clarify the idea behind the view was to supplement the tabs not to do away with them. I like the tabs but they just get too unmanageable when there are many open editors and there just needs to be another way to switch between them other then scrolling through the tabs that are out of view. This is just merely a means to incorporate the Editor Dialog functionality into some thing that can always be present without the need of having to open it all of the time, which is just a pain in my opinion.
FYI: A draft proposal for 'Contexts' has been posted to the Platform UI proposals page at: http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/%7Echeckout%7E/platform-ui-home/docs.html. It is expected that contexts will form *a small part* of the solution to this plan item. (see 'Context Aware Editors' for details)
Please try out Editor managment (single tab and multiple tab mode) in the Feb 17, 2004 integration build.
